There’s another video that Patterico’s Pontifications, Patterico.com, has uncovered. [Again: it was Morgen who uncovered it. — Ed.] They’ve released a video of State Senator Barack Obama from Illinois. This is January 21st, 2002 in Chicago at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. This is during Martin Luther King Jr. day memorial services.

OBAMA 2002 (garbled audio): I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

OBAMA 2002: Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want!

AUDIENCE: (applause and laughter)

OBAMA 2002: They want to make sure people don’t take their stuff. But the principle of empathy recognizes –

RUSH: All right. Kill it, kill it, kill it. With all that god reverb, you can’t understand. I’ll read to you what he’s saying: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure people don’t take their stuff. But the principle of empathy recognizes that there are more subtle forms of violence to which we are answerable.

“The spirit of empathy condemns not only the use of fire hoses and attack dogs to keep people down but also accountants and tax loopholes to keep people down. … When a company town sees its plant closing because some distant executives made some decision despite the wage concessions, despite the tax breaks, and they see their entire economy collapsing, they feel violence…”

This is Obama ten years ago. He hasn’t changed, is the point. This is who he is! The rich, of course, they’re all for nonviolence. They don’t like community organizers. They don’t like people raising hell in the streets. They don’t like violence. They got their stuff. They got what they want. They just want to make sure that folks don’t take their stuff. By the way, that’s why Bill Gates and Warren Buffett run around and claim they’re for tax increases.

Folks like Morgen, and Charles Johnson at the Daily Caller (the “good” Charles Johnson), and John Sexton at Breitbart.com, represent the kind of blogger I admire most: someone who actually goes out and digs up something new, rather than just flapping their gums about the latest morsels thrown at us by Big Media. Folks like this don’t follow the news cycle. They create the news cycle. I’m proud to know them and I thank Morgen for his occasional contributions here.

The following clips are from 2002. Obama is speaking in a church at a 2002 Martin Luther King Jr. Day memorial service.

The full speech is here, and by and large it is a nice speech by a rising politician. Obama speaks about the need for empathy in society, about taking responsibility for our actions, and the audacity of hope. He levels barbs at the wealthy and unempathetic, but also criticizes those who blame the system for the arrest of O.J. Simpson and the crack epidemic. Although the audio quality is poor because of the echo in the church, one can tell that Obama is well spoken and articulate. Joe Biden would have been proud.

But there are a few times when the mask slips, just a little.

My favorite clip is this one, where he speaks of Dr. King’s philosophy of non-violence, and explains that it works only when there is empathy:

Transcript:

The philosophy of nonviolence only makes sense if the powerful can be made to recognize themselves in the powerless. It only makes sense if the powerless can be made to recognize themselves in the powerful. You know, the principle of empathy gives broader meaning, by the way, to Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure people don’t take their stuff. But the principle of empathy recognizes that there are more subtle forms of violence to which we are answerable. The spirit of empathy condemns not only the use of firehoses and attack dogs to keep people down but also accountants and tax loopholes to keep people down. I’m not saying that what Enron executives did to their employees is the moral equivalent of what Bull Connor did to black folks, but I’ll tell you what, the employees at Enron feel violated. When a company town sees its plant closing because some distant executives made some decision despite the wage concessions, despite the tax breaks, and they see their entire economy collapsing, they feel violence . . .

Other clips are linked below. I was struck by the way that Obama portrayed those who commit crimes and become imprisoned are “caught up” in a “prison industrial complex” that would not be tolerated if white people didn’t think of blacks and Latinos as unlike them.

And the class warfare talk never ends.

What Obama really thought about the Clinton years. Quote: “Among African American males, one third to one fourth caught up in the criminal justice system, so that the number of young men incarcerated exceeded the number enrolled in colleges and universities. Throughout the nation inequality up, trust in mutuality down . . . the evidence was there if we cared to look.”

Local funding of schools is “fundamentally unjust.” Quote: “And Illinois, like many states in the country, has an education system that is funded by property taxes. It is fundamentally unjust. So you have folks up in Winnetka, pupils who are getting five times as much money per student as students in the South Side of Chicago.”